Radicalism and the Emerging Historical Profession in Victorian England: The Case of John Richard Green‪.‬

There has been a renewed interest by scholars during the last decade in the historians of the Victorian era, focusing on two aspects of the history writing of that period: 1) the Victorians' obsession with tracing the origins and gradual evolution of the English constitution, or what J. W. Burrow has termed a Liberal Descent; (1) 2) the complex transition, starting in the latter half of the nineteenth century, from general, popular, "literary" history to narrower, more specialized works intended largely for academic audiences--a transition depicted in the works of scholars like Rosemary Jann and Philippa Levine as one from amateurism to professionalism. (2) Both of these elements are illuminated by considering the life and work of John Richard Green (1837-1883). An overemphasis on Green's attachment to "liberal descent" doctrine has obscured an advanced radicalism in his writing that was scornful of traditional elites and hereditary power. The bracketing of Green with Edward A. Freeman and William Stubbs in the "Oxford School" of historians has compounded this misinterpretation. (3) Concerning the transition to professionalism, there is a parallel problem. The tendency to regard Green as an "amateur" because of the sweeping scope, literary quality, popular tone, and brisk sales of his Short History of the English People (1874) misses an essential point: the closing out of radical perspectives in the narrowly-focused institutional studies that came to characterize "professional" history writing at universities by the late-Victorian period. The roots of the historian's radicalism are to be found in his social marginality and a painful and protracted crisis of faith. Growing up in Oxford as the son of a hardworking, financially pressed tailor, Green developed an ambivalent attitude towards the University. There was an attachment to it from his father's position as a maker of silk gowns for Fellows and from his frequent injunctions to the boy to emulate a great uncle who had been Vice-Principal of Magdalen Hall. (4) It was this worthy who was constantly held up for emulation to John Green and his younger brother Richard. As the historian's wife Alice put it many years later, the boys were "brought up in the idea that they were to take him as an example, and to restore the family to a better position." (5)